Full Metal Jacket

Friday, 11 November 2005

I have, for several years, subscribed to the theory that those who are
mostly desk-bound should buy the cheapest laptop they can get by with
and the most expensive desktop system they can afford. One reason is
the idea that laptops — slower and more fragile — aren’t really
worth a big investment. Better, say, to spend $1200 on a 12-inch iBook
and $1800 on an iMac than to spend $3,000 on a big PowerBook. Get a
portable that’s truly portable, and use a real desktop system the rest
of the time.

As of two weeks ago, I officially unsubscribed from this theory, and I
am filing this report on a new 15-inch PowerBook G4, maxed out with 2
GB of RAM and the 7200-RPM hard drive upgrade I pondered in my
initial coverage the day these new machines were announced. New
theory: get the best PowerBook you can and live off it.

Factors that led my change of heart:

I successfully lived off my previous laptop, a seemingly skimpy
800 MHz iBook G3, for about 18 months. Until Tiger came along and
made getting by on 640 MB of RAM (the maximum for that iBook)
untenable, my only significant gripe about my all-iBook
all-the-time lifestyle was the limited number of pixels on the
display. (Which, considering the advantages to larger displays, is
admittedly a significant gripe. But in my experience, if you’re
not switching back and forth from a large display to a small
12-inch display, it’s something you can get accustomed to.)

Synching data between two Macs sucks. Even if the .Mac
synching-related fixes mentioned in the Mac OS X 10.4.3 release
notes are for real — like, say, if the MirrorAgent
background process no longer has a tendency to occasionally wedge
itself mid-sync (which, so far in my use of 10.4.3, does seem to
be true) — synching data between two machines is never going to
be as convenient as having a single data store.

No matter how satisfied you are with the current state of data
synching, there’s no means at all for session synching. In an
ideal world, there’d be a way to, say, work for a few hours on a
Power Mac G5, then put it to sleep, open up an iBook or PowerBook,
and continue working in the same session you left behind on the
desktop machine: open documents, running apps, browser windows,
etc. The idea being you could pick up right where you left off
when moving from one machine to another. This could be feasible,
theoretically, with some sort of remote login system, where the
laptop could act as a remote keyboard and display for a login
session that continues to run on a more powerful desktop system.
But in the here and now, on Mac OS X, there’s no such thing: if
you want to just pick up where you left off when moving from one
physical location to another, you’ve got to take the computer with
you.

Top-of-the-line PowerBooks are now in the $2000 range, not the
$3000 range. The argument that you could get a new iBook and an
iMac for the same price as one PowerBook no longer holds.

Your mileage, of course, may vary. Jonathan Rentzsch, for one, is
moving in the opposite direction: he’s considering a switch
from the “live off your PowerBook” lifestyle toward getting a
high-end desktop and a low-end iBook for when he truly needs a
portable. But the problem he’s facing trying to live off his PowerBook
isn’t shared by me, and, likely, not by you, either:

It may sound wacky, but I need to be able to boot between at least
four versions of Mac OS X on a regular basis:

The last major previous OS version (today, that would be 10.3)
for the older stuff I’m still bringing forward.

The normal, current version of the OS (10.4.2 today).

A backup of the current version (I apply Software Update
fearlessly knowing when it screws up — and it does on a regular
basis — salvation is a quick reboot away).

The next upcoming version.

Each of these boot partitions really need to be at least 20 GB large in
order to tolerate full installs of iLife, iWork, Virtual PC, Adobe
apps, and developer tools.

The showstopper is that my current working set is 60 GB large. If you
do the math, you’ll see even the largest notebook hard drive available
today is some 25 formatted gigabytes shy of what I need. Right now I’m
managing with an external bus-powered FireWire hard drive, but it’s a
pain.

Of course, assuming his requirement for being able to boot into 10.3
is non-negotiable, even if Apple were to offer new PowerBooks with
hard drives capacious enough to accommodate his storage needs, it
still would not help Rentzsch; new Macintosh hardware never boots
previous major versions of the Mac OS. A 15- or 17-inch PowerBook
purchased today won’t even boot 10.4.1 or 10.4.0, let alone 10.3.x.
(I’m not sure about the 12-inch models, which in their current
incarnation are hardly any different than those introduced in January;
but at least in terms of official sanctioned-by-Apple support, they
too require 10.4.2 or later.)

For most people, however, including yours truly, the 120 GB maximum
size of a laptop drive is not a limiting factor, and a new PowerBook
is a reasonable choice to serve as the sole workstation even for
demanding users.

And so after two weeks of daily use, here’s a review of the late 2005
15-inch PowerBook G4.

Appearance

The aluminum case of the 15-inch PowerBook G4 is largely unchanged
since it debuted in September 2003, and appearance-wise, isn’t all
that different from the titanium “TiBook” PowerBooks that ushered in
the portable G4 era back in January 2001.1

It’s a design that has aged well. Handsome and austere, there are few
visible elements on the PowerBook case that aren’t functional, with
the notable and obvious exception of the light-up Apple logo adorning
the back of the screen, which logo is emblematic of Apple’s
post-millennial industrial design: its size, position, and luminance
all seem spot-on perfect. It’s even worth noting that the logo is
correctly oriented, considering that until the PowerBook G4, the Apple
logos on the backs of PowerBook screens were oriented the wrong way,
such that they looked “correct” when you, the user, sat in front of a
closed PowerBook, but appeared upside down to anyone looking at the
back of an open one.

Other than in the small-print legalese on the bottom of the case, the
PowerBook does not say “Apple”. It isn’t necessary for Apple to
heavy-handedly brand their case designs; the cases themselves — their
shapes, their materials, their proportions, and of course the Apple
logo — are the Apple brand.

There’s an extraordinary simplicity to the exteriors of all of Apple’s
current portables. Viewed straight-on from any angle — top, front,
side — the shape is a simple rectangle with round corners (a
“roundrect” in QuickDraw parlance). When open, the
cross-section of either half of an iBook or PowerBook forms a simple
sort of “D” shape. (This same D-shape profile is used on the new iPods
and iPod Nanos, although the bottom edges of the Nano are only subtly
rounded off.) The edges are mostly the same on all four sides. There
are a minimum of visible seams and no superfluous decorative elements.

Compare and contrast with an older design from Apple itself: the
original clamshell candy-colored iBooks. Even when it was new,
many Mac users found the original iBooks to be, at best, rather
trendy. But even leaving the rather childish color schemes aside —
imagine, say, if they had been all-white — the swoopy, curvy,
clamshell case lacked the quiet elegance of the modern iBook.

Better yet, compare and contrast to the exterior of your typical PC
laptop: two-tone plastic, gratuitously beveled corner edges, dozens of
silly extra buttons surrounding the keyboard, and so forth. The
difference is that PC hardware appears not to be designed so much as
decorated. There are exceptions — IBM’s ThinkPads and Sony’s Vaios
are generally pretty good-looking machines. But I don’t think they
look as good as PowerBooks or iBooks, and one reason is that although
they’re simple, they’re not simple enough.

Epitomizing the PC industry’s lack of respect for their own case
aesthetics are those ubiquitous little stamp-sized decals peppered
over their laptops’ palm-rest areas. One for Windows, one for Intel
(or AMD), sometimes a couple more for components like the graphics
card. They’re garish and turn the surface of one’s laptop into a
Nascar-style promotion board. Sure, you can peel them off, but judging
from the laptops I see in coffee shops and airports, very few people
actually do. Presumably these decals are part of the licensing deals
struck between the laptop makers and Microsoft, Intel, et al., but why
not just say no? We’ll buy your CPUs; we’ll license your operating
system; but we’re not going to put your ugly fucking stickers on our
computers. Apple is slated to soon start using the same Intel x86
guts as other laptop manufacturers, but I’ll eat my hat if they start
boogering up their cases with “Intel Inside” decals.

In terms of sheer processing performance, the PowerBook has clearly
fallen behind. The aluminum 15-inch PowerBook G4 was introduced two
years ago with a top speed of 1.25 GHz; it’s now two years later and
the top speed has increased a measly 33 percent. But in terms of
visual appeal, the brushed metal PowerBook is still the best in the
industry, and looks just as good today as when the first Titanium
PowerBook shipped back in 2001.

Materials

The current PowerBooks’ brushed aluminum exterior conveys a sense of
ruggedness. However, based on anecdotal evidence from
aluminum-PowerBook-using friends and colleagues, I suspect the
aluminum PowerBooks look and feel more rugged than they actually are.
The corners, for example, are prone to denting, which in turn can
lead to problems with the power adapter socket.

The über-plasticy white iBooks may not look as rugged (or cool) as
their PowerBook brethren — broad-stroke instinct holding that metal
is strong, plastic is chintzy — but I think the opposite is true.
This isn’t to say the aluminum PowerBook casing is flimsy, or even
that in the grand scheme of notebook computers it isn’t in fact more
rugged than most, but from what I’ve seen, mile for mile, iBooks hold
up better than PowerBooks.

iBooks also get better AirPort reception than do PowerBooks. At my
desk in my home office, my old iBook gets a strong signal from the
base station 15 feet across the room and picks up about 3 or 4 other
wireless networks from neighbors. The PowerBook doesn’t get as strong
a signal from my base station (although it’s certainly “strong
enough”), and doesn’t detect any of my neighbors’ wireless networks.

If in some hyper-configurable alternate universe I were able to order
the same laptop as this new PowerBook but with an iBook-style shell,
I’d take it. Sure, the brushed aluminum looks cooler, but I’d happily
accept the trade-off for something more durable and with better
AirPort reception.

Keyboard and RAM

One area where PowerBook hardware is clearly superior to that of iBooks
is the keyboard. I consider PowerBook keyboards superior in
every regard.

Most importantly to me, they just plain feel better when typing.
There’s a certain flimsiness to the iBook keyboard 2 as a whole, which manifests as a sort
of saggyness or lack of rigidity. I suspect this is mostly to blame on
the fact that the iBook keyboard serves a user-accessible hatch; you
need to pop off the entire keyboard to access the iBook’s RAM and
AirPort slots.

On the PowerBook, on the other hand, the RAM slots are accessible via
a dedicated hatch on the bottom of the case, which design not
only allows for a sturdier-feeling keyboard, but also makes for the
most easily-accessed RAM slots on any Mac I’ve ever owned. (The worst
was the original G3 iMac.) I bought the PowerBook with the default 512
MB of memory, but replaced it with two 1 GB chips for the maximum
allocation of 2 GB. My only gripe about the process is that the screws
securing the hatch were excessively tight; if you don’t have a good
Philips size 00 screwdriver, I recommend getting one before attempting
to unfasten these screws, lest you risk stripping them, or slipping and
disfiguring the case with a deep scratch.

In addition to feeling sturdier as a unit, the individual keys on the
PowerBook feel better. They’re clickier, in a good way. (As a point of
reference regarding my taste in keyboards, it’s worth mentioning that
at my desk, I still attach my beloved 14-year-old Apple Extended
Keyboard II, which I consider the single best hardware product Apple
has ever manufactured.) In terms of “how it feels while typing”, this
PowerBook’s is the best laptop keyboard I’ve ever used.

The other major feature of the 15-inch (and 17-inch) PowerBook
keyboard is that it offers illumination, which illumination can be
triggered automatically by ambient light sensors located under the
speaker grille. The sensor works great, and the illumination is
genuinely handy in low-light situations. I expect this feature to
eventually find its way into every Apple laptop.

The perfectionist in me wants to complain about the fact that, when
illumination is on, some light spills from between the keys,
particularly at the edges of the keyboard. In a perfect
implementation, rather than merely allowing light to shine through
from a single source under the keyboard, each individual key would
contain its own light source. But I won’t complain about this, if for
no other reason than that such a keyboard might be prohibitively
expensive.

My only actual complaint about the PowerBook keyboard is the Enter
key next to the right-side Command key; I would much prefer to
have a second Option key there. Yes, yes, Enter is a different key
than Return on a Mac, but if you really need Enter while using the
PowerBook keyboard, you can use Fn + Return. I’ve been baffled by this
key arrangement for years — who uses the Enter key so much that it
deserves such a prominent spot on the keyboard?

My suggested solution would be for Apple to allow this key to be
remapped using the new-to-Tiger “Modifier Keys” section of the
Keyboard & Mouse System Prefs panel. Sure, “Enter” isn’t
technically a modifier key, but on Apple’s portable keyboards it’s
placed in a spot where many people might prefer an Option or Control
key.

I’m aware of no low-impact workarounds or hacks for tweaking this key,
where by “low-impact” I mean “something other than a kernel extension
that typically needs to be updated with each minor revision of the
OS”. Until fairly recently, iBooks and PowerBooks still used ADB for
their built-in keyboards and trackpads, and on such machines, that
damned Enter key can be remapped by editing a plist file in the ADB
driver kernel extension. I used this trick on my old iBook
without a problem, but I’m aware of no such “just modify this plist”
style hack for the late-model PowerBooks and iBooks which use USB
internally. (If anyone out there knows of a solution, I’d love to hear
it. Cupertino-area readers, I’m looking in your direction.)

Display

The most obvious reasons to get a 15- or 17-inch PowerBook instead of
an iBook are the built-in displays. The improved displays are also the
single biggest difference between these new PowerBooks and the
previous models they replaced: the 15-inch PowerBook now offers
1440 × 960 resolution, up from 1280 × 854; the 17-inch offers 1680 × 1050,
up from 1440 × 900. Which means:

The new 15-inch PowerBook offers slightly more pixels than the
17-inch used to.

The new 17-inch PowerBook offers the same number of pixels as the
20-inch Cinema Display.

Both offer a ton more pixels than the iBooks or the 12-inch
PowerBook, all of which offer only 1024 × 768 resolution.

The more pixels the better, in general, because more information is
visible simultaneously on-screen. The productivity benefits of larger
displays are provable. With desktop displays, when you add
more pixels to a display, you can increase the physical size of the
display to fit them. (Cf. the massive 30-inch Cinema Display.) With
laptops, however, there’s a trade-off: more pixels may be better, but
you can’t keep expanding the physical size of the screen to
accommodate them. The 17-inch PowerBook form factor is, in my opinion,
about as big as a portable computer can get while still being
considered a “laptop”; a 20-inch PowerBook would be suited for a very
large lap, indeed.

So when you squeeze more pixels into the same size display, you wind
up with smaller pixels. In some ways, more pixels per square inch is
better — it’s a higher resolution per actual inch of screen space.
But in other ways, given some of the assumptions of the current Mac
OS, too high of a resolution, in terms of pixels per inch, would be
undesirable. Nearly all of the elements of the Mac OS X user interface
are specified in pixels — the menu bar is 22 pixels high, the
standard height of a text editing field (e.g. the location field in
Safari) is 22 pixels, etc. So, when you make the pixels smaller on
your display, the elements of the user interface become smaller in
terms of actual units of distance.

In theory, a 200-pixel-per-inch display would be wonderful: at that
resolution I suspect on-screen type rendering, thanks to
anti-aliasing, would appear to be of roughly the same sharpness and
fidelity as the output of a typical inkjet printer. But in today’s Mac
OS, a 200-ppi display would be nearly unusable; UI elements and
on-screen text would be about half the size of what you see on the
screen you’re using today.

Apple is aware of this, and there is already developer-level
technology in Mac OS X 10.4 laying the groundwork for a future release
of Mac OS X with a scalable, resolution-independent interface. That’s
the future; the question today is whether the resolution of the new
PowerBook display is too high given the pixel-based nature of the
current Mac OS UI.

My answer: No, the resolution is just fine. Things do look a little
small, but it’s really not that much different than the
pixels-per-inch resolution of the 12-inch PowerBook and iBook.

Here’s a table comparing the resolutions of Apple’s current displays,
3
as well as the previous 15- and 17-inch PowerBook displays:

Display

Width

Height

PPI

12-inch PowerBook/iBook

1024

768

107

14-inch iBook

1024

768

91

15-inch PowerBook G4 (new)

1440

960

114

15-inch PowerBook G4 (old)

1280

854

102

17-inch PowerBook G4 (new)

1680

1050

117

17-inch PowerBook G4 (old)

1440

900

100

20-inch Cinema Display

1680

1050

99

23-inch Cinema Display

1920

1200

98

30-inch Cinema Display

2560

1600

102

So, yes, the new PowerBook displays are the densest in Apple’s
line-up, but they’re only about 10 pixels-per-inch denser than the
12-inch displays. I don’t think, however, that another shift like this
will occur until after Mac OS X fully embraces a scalable
user interface. A hypothetical 15-inch PowerBook display with
1680 × 1050 resolution would work out to 132 ppi — significantly
higher than any of the current displays.

Apple claims the new 15-inch PowerBook display is 20-some percent
brighter than before, and, indeed, it’s quite bright for a laptop.
Next to my 20-inch Cinema Display, however — but not unexpectedly —
it seems a tad dingy. The higher resolution is also a bit noticeable
when compared side-by-side with the Cinema Display, but not
distractingly so, and the fact that you can easily connect to an
external display for an extended multiple-display desktop is one of
the nicest features of the PowerBooks.

(iBooks only support display mirroring, where an external display
can only show the same thing as what’s on the internal display. This
limitation is seemingly artificial; unsupported hacks allow you
to diddle your system to allow iBooks to span the desktop across a
second display.)

The PowerBooks’ support for external displays is quite clever. When
the PowerBook wakes from sleep (or starts up), it detects which
displays are available and uses them. This means you can walk around
using the built-in display, set it down, connect an external display,
and it automatically recognizes the just-connected external display
and uses it. If you keep the PowerBook open, it uses the external
display in addition to the built-in display; if you keep the PowerBook
closed, it uses the external display instead of the internal.
Disconnect the external display, and the right thing will happen,
where by “right thing” I mean that any windows which were open on the
no-longer-available display will be moved to the internal display, and
resized, if necessary, to fit.

Do any Windows-based laptops offer this sort of on-the-fly
auto-detection of external displays? I honestly don’t know.

And speaking of Wintel laptop displays, what is the deal with the
growing trend of laptop displays being treated with some sort of
super-high-gloss finish? This isn’t something where some laptop
displays are a bit shinier than others; it’s a dramatic, instantly
discernible difference. During a recent trip to Fry’s, the majority
of the laptops they had on display had screens which were treated with
this hyper-glossy finish.

What is behind this trend? Are these screens significantly cheaper? If
not, what is the appeal? Why would anyone want a screen so glossy that
it’s reflective? These screens quite obviously are more prone to glare
from light sources, and the glossy finish would seemingly bring even
more attention to smudges left behind by the ignorant mouth-breathing
sort of people who touch computer displays with their fingers.

Needless to say, the new PowerBook displays use no such coating.

Miscellanea

My PowerBook shipped with a custom build of Mac OS X 10.4.2,
build number 8E45; the mainline release of 10.4.2 was build number
8C46. This is naught but a historical footnote at this juncture,
however, given that 10.4.3 was released on October 31.

I mentioned earlier that I took the $200 build-to-order option to
upgrade from the stock 80 GB 5400 RPM hard drive to a 100 GB 7200
RPM drive. What Apple doesn’t advertise regarding this option is
exactly which 100 GB 7200 RPM drive you get. I’m aware of two:
the Hitachi Travelstar 7K100, and the Seagate Momentus
7200.1 (model number ST910021A). I’m happy to report that,
according to System Profiler, my PowerBook shipped with the
Seagate Momentus. I say “happy” because according to these
benchmarks from Bare Feats, the Seagate is faster. (Although
to be fair, their comparison was against the 60 GB Hitachi.)

I’m unsure why Apple doesn’t tell you which make and model drives
you get, but presumably it’s because they want to keep their
options open if, say, Hitachi Travelstars suddenly become much
cheaper than Seagate Momentuses.

I can’t get used to the new two-finger scrolling feature
supported by this year’s PowerBook trackpads. It’s a useful
feature and it seems to work really well, but I never remember
to use it. I suppose it will grow on me.

However, occasionally drags don’t seem to register on the trackpad
— I’ll drag one finger across the pad, but the cursor won’t move
at all on screen. I’ll immediately repeat the same finger drag,
and it works. I’m not sure if this is some sort of confusion with
regard to how many fingers the trackpad senses I’m using, or if
it’s some other problem, like the static electricity glitch
Rentzsch complained about in his aforementioned “No PowerBook Can
Hold Me”. I never had this problem with my iBook trackpad.

Speaking of the trackpad, I found that the button had a rather
strange clickiness to it at first, as though it were slightly
“stuck”. After a few days of use, I no longer noticed it; I’m not
sure if it was simply a case of my getting accustomed to it, or if
it was something that changed after a few days of breaking in. I
suspect it’s a little bit of both.

The machine is very quiet — it’s been days since I noticed the
fan, and even then it was quiet. And contrary to some people’s
warnings about 7200 RPM drives, the disk is nearly silent, and
unquestionably quieter than the slower drive in my old iBook.

Several MacInTouch readers have reported an odd “looping”
sound glitch during music playback from iTunes (or in one reader’s
case, QuickTime Player). I’ve heard this too — it’s very similar
to the sound of a CD player skipping while playing a scratched
disc, but of course, I’m not playing CDs. The skipping lasts for a
few seconds and then corrects itself, and stopping / starting
playback fixes it as well. What’s so curious about this is that it
apparently only happens on new 15-inch PowerBooks.

The MacInTouch report also contains several reports from readers
who perceive distracting horizontal lines between each row of
pixels on screen. I notice no such thing. Whatever the issue is
here, it seems to be quite subjective. Those who perceive it seem
to see it in every 15-inch PowerBook, not just in one
particular (i.e. possibly defective) unit. So if you’re thinking
about getting one but are concerned about this “I see distracting
horizontal lines” issue, I suggest looking at one in person at an
Apple Store before ordering. This is also sound advice for anyone
concerned about the new machines’ denser screen resolutions.

Conclusion

The elephant in the room, of course, is next year’s pending switch to
Intel processors. Does it make sense to buy a new PowerPC-based
PowerBook now — or any other Mac, for that matter — when new and
potentially significantly faster hardware will be available next year?

Word on the street is that “pro” machines will switch last, and the
first machines to make the switch will be the consumer-oriented
machines like the Mini and iBook. But it seems unlikely to me that
Apple is going to make the current PowerBook form factor last all the
way through 2006. Especially if there’s pent up demand for Mac laptops
from people who might have otherwise already bought a new PowerBook,
but decided to wait to see what the Intel era brings, it could well be
in Apple’s interests to unveil higher-margin Intel PowerBooks before
the iBooks.

But it’s all conjecture, and no one outside Apple knows the actual
time table.

I have no doubt that whenever Intel-based PowerBooks do ship, they’ll
provide a significant performance boost over the final generation of
PowerPC models. But it’s always been the case that “next year’s”
model will be faster, and, quite often, cheaper as well. The pending
switch to Intel doesn’t change my basic buying advice: if you need a
new Mac now, get one now.

Anyone already using an aluminum-era PowerBook G4 would probably be well-advised to wait; the new screens are better, but overall system performance hasn’t improved dramatically.

But I can think of a handful of reasons why someone might want a
last-generation PowerPC Mac instead of a first-generation Intel, even
if they’re willing to wait another six months to a year. For one
thing, if you use big-brand software from companies like Adobe and
Microsoft, native-for-Intel universal binary versions aren’t likely to
be available until quite some time after Apple starts shipping Intel
Macs, and even then, I expect them to ship in the form of for-pay
major-version upgrades. The current versions of Adobe’s and Microsoft’s
suites should run under Rosetta, but I strongly suspect performance
won’t be as good as on last-generation PowerPC machines. I.e. the
first generation Intel Macs will be faster than the last generation
PowerPC ones, but not so much faster that they can run PowerPC
binaries under Rosetta faster than they natively run on PowerPC
processors. That’s just my (somewhat informed) hunch.

Second, new first generation Mac hardware historically has a tendency
to be flakier than subsequent speed-bump revisions. In the case of
Titanium PowerBooks, this flakiness was quite literal — the titanium
surface finish started peeling off their cases after a few months of
use. If you’d prefer to wait for “Rev. B” of the next new PowerBook
generation, you’ll probably have to wait until early 2007 at the
earliest.

One reason Apple has occasional problems with the sturdiness of
first-generation new hardware, perhaps, is their iron-clad secrecy
during development. Take for example the iPod Nano, and its
now-infamous propensity for collecting scratches. I’ve heard many
people question why Apple shipped the Nano like this, since they “must
have known” that it was so easily scratched. I suspect they didn’t
know, because in their desire for secrecy only a few people ever saw
the prototypes before they went into production, and they never took
the prototype Nanos out of their development lab. The only way to test
what happens when you really use something is to really use it, but to
really use a still-in-development Nano would have meant allowing
people to take them out of the lab, which inevitably would have meant
allowing them to be described on the rumor sites before they were
announced. My money is on a “Rev. B” Nano some time early next year
with a more scratch-resistant surface treatment.

Given that the next generation of Mac hardware is being developed
under the same sort of secrecy, it may well be worth your patience to
let others do the field testing for first-generation “Rev. A” models
of Intel-based PowerBooks and iBooks.

Depending on Apple’s Intel time table, there may yet be one more
speed-bump revision in the PowerBook G4’s future. But if not, the
current 15-inch PowerBook G4 is an appropriate send-off to one of the
best products in Apple’s history.

The aluminum 12- and 17-inch PowerBooks were introduced in January 2003, but the 15-inch model remained stuck with the inferior prone-to-flaking Titanium case for another eight months.
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I percieve this same flimsiness on all modern iBook keyboards, 12- and 14-inch alike, from both the G3 and G4 eras.
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The 30-inch Cinema Display measures at 29.7 viewable inches, and the 15-inch PowerBooks measure 15.2, just in case you think my math is off by a pixel.
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